


right where it begins

by walkthegale



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Femslash, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Polyamory, Roommates, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-24 23:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21346675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkthegale/pseuds/walkthegale
Summary: “Tell me a story.”
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jester Lavorre/Yasha
Comments: 42
Kudos: 328
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	right where it begins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [definefreedom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/definefreedom/gifts).

“Tell me a story.”

“What?”

Beau props her hands behind her head and stares at the dark ceiling. “Can’t sleep. You’re always reading all sorts of shit out to everyone.” She wriggles to get comfortable, kicking the blankets down around her feet. “So tell me a story.”

She hears Jester shift in the other bed. “You really want me to?” she says, after a moment.

“Jeez, don’t be weird about it,” Beau regrets her tone as soon as she says it - she can picture Jester’s face falling. She tries again, softer this time. “I mean, uh, if you want to, yeah, I’d like that.”

The other bed squeaks a few times and Beau’s sure Jester is bouncing around on it. “Ok!” Jester’s grin is evident in her voice now and she speaks fast. “Ok, what kind of story would you like me to tell you, Beau? Because I know _so many stories_. And I could probably make ones up that are _even better_ than the ones I already know!” There’s a brief, thoughtful pause, during which Beau can’t help but smile, and then Jester continues. “Ok, ok, I’m going to tell you a story about an adventure! With mermaids in it! But, like, friendly mermaids, not creepy ones like Dashilla, you know. So there was this beautiful half-elf lady, who lived in a castle by the sea...”

Jester’s voice in the darkness settles into a soothing rhythm. Beau doesn’t know whether she’s repeating a story she read somewhere, or whether it’s one she made up herself, but she’s a decent storyteller, either way. She gains confidence as she goes, weaving in lush descriptions and lavish details, and she even tries out a couple of different voices for the characters. Beau winds up pretty immersed in the tale, almost despite herself.

“And they lived happily ever after. The end,” Jester proclaims, as her protagonists sail off into the sunset together.

Beau finds she’s actually kind of sad that it’s over. She feels kind of like she should applaud or some shit. “Hey Jes, that was awesome,” she settles for saying.

“Really?” Jester’s reply is quieter that Beau would have expected. “You really think so?”

“Yeah,” Beau tells her. She tries to make herself sound as sincere as she feels, and she thinks she does a pretty good job of it. “Yeah, you’re really good at it.”

“Thanks, Beau. My momma always said I was, but probably she would say that even if I wasn’t.”

“Your mom is right.” Beau turns over to face Jester’s bed. She can just about make out the outline of Jester in the sliver of moonlight that seeps through the cracks around the window shutters. Jester is facing her too, and she suddenly feels awkward about the whole thing. “Hey, uh, thanks.”

“It’s ok,” Jester sounds sleepy now, like she’s stifling a yawn. “You can always ask me, you know,” she adds. “I’ll always tell you stories, if you want.”

Beau listens as Jester’s breathing slows and evens out, eventually turning into the quiet, gentle snores that she’s got so used to hearing almost every night since they met. They used to drive her nuts, but she actually kind of misses them now on the rare occasions she and Jester sleep in separate places.

It still takes a while for Beau’s thoughts to quiet enough to let her sleep, but she feels better about it than she did before.

***

It becomes a habit. Not every night, of course, but on the long and restless ones, if they’ve had a difficult day, or a frustrating one, or something shitty or weird has happened. The nights when Beau’s brain won’t shut up for five seconds put together and she considers giving up on sleep entirely.

Sometimes she does give up, of course. Sometimes she goes looking for other ways to still her mind - something to drink, something to do, someone to fuck or punch or, hell, sometimes both.

But sometimes, lying on her bed, or her bedroll under the stars, or whatever lumpy bullshit passes for a bed in whatever roadside inn they’ve found to stay at, far from any of their homes, she’ll turn to Jester and say, “Hey Jes, tell me a story?”

And Jester always obliges.

She’s a walking repository of stories. There might be more stories in Jester’s head than in all of the Cobalt Soul libraries in all of Wildemount. There are unicorns in Jester’s stories, and pirates, and fairies, and princesses. Adventures and grand romances and no shortage of melodrama. Battles won, nefarious enemies defeated, everything drawn to a satisfying conclusion. Always a happy ending.

***

There’s a very bad night, after a battle where everything goes to shit fast, and they hardly make it out with any of their lives. Beau went down twice, Yasha once, when even her rage couldn’t help her. And they weren’t the only ones.

Beau believed, really and truly believed, for a while, in the middle of all the blood and adrenaline, that she was going to watch all her friends die. That there was nothing she could do about it.

It’s the sort of night where Beau wants to get very drunk and maybe start a good old-fashioned bar brawl, but she’s beyond exhausted and beaten and doesn’t know where the nearest bar might be anyway.

So she sleeps, fitfully, and she wakes up shaking, with the sheets all twisted and knotted around her legs, and sticky sweat cooling on her skin. She doesn’t remember what the nightmare was, only darkness and terror and she _couldn’t save anyone_, and now her heart wants to beat its way right out of her chest.

She takes a shuddering breath, and then another, and then lets out a yell as someone slips into the bed alongside her.

Jester puts her hand on Beau’s arm, and one of the half-healed bruises there aches, deep and grounding. “It’s ok Beau, it’s just me.”

Beau focuses on breathing again, until she feels herself start to even out. It’s Jester. It’s only Jester. She’s safe and Jester is safe, and everyone else is safe in their own rooms, though probably awake now after she made that noise. She abruptly remembers screaming in her dream and wonders if she was maybe screaming for real too. That’s kind of fucking embarrassing.

Jester, meanwhile, smoothes the sheets back into place to cover them both. The bed is somewhat too small to hold them both comfortably, but she positions herself so that she can put her arm around Beau’s shoulders and Beau is resting against the soft, solid warmth of her.

And she tells Beau a story.

The protagonist of this one is a monk. She’s brave and clever and caring, and she saves her friends' lives and defeats every bad guy who dares cross her path without breaking a sweat.

Jester stays with Beau until Beau falls asleep, deep and dreamless this time. When Beau wakes, Jester is back in her own bed, a mop of hair and horns stuck out from under the blankets, snoring faintly.

Beau watches her for a long moment. She will not fuck up this friendship. Come hell or high fucking water, she will _not_. She slips out to begin her morning training routine, careful not to wake Jester as she goes.

***

Sometimes Jester tells stories from her own bed, and sometimes she tells them from Beau’s. Occasionally, Beau joins Jester on her bed, though she never gets under the covers, just flops across the end, or sprawls sideways, sticking her feet up against the wall, always as casual as she can.

The awesome monk protagonist shows up in more than one story. She’s always daring and brilliant, and she always saves the world, and at the end she always gets the girl.

(Sometimes, in the very back of her mind, the part she doesn’t let herself look at very much, that she refuses to trust, Beau thinks that the girl in those stories is, more often than not, kind of like Jester.)

***

When Yasha is taken from them by Obann, the stories stop for a while.

Beau hears Jester, late at night when Jester thinks she’s asleep, talking to the Traveler. Sometimes she hears her crying.

She doesn’t say anything. Everyone’s allowed their own time to cry. She’s not going to get in the way of that.

Jester’s sadness burns in the centre of Beau’s chest, almost as badly as Yasha’s absence.

One night there’s a thunderstorm, sharp and violent, all pouring rain and howling wind and lightning splitting the sky in two. Beau comes to their room late, with wet hair and grazed knuckles and the start of a black-eye blooming above her cheekbone. She finds Jester sitting curled on her bed, with her sketchbook open in her lap, though there’s nothing on the page but an unintelligible scribble of ink, and some smudges that look a lot like tear stains.

Beau sits down next to Jester and wraps her arms tight around her. “Love you, Jes,” she says. Jester feels sort of rigid, like her whole body is so tense she might snap in two if Beau isn’t careful. 

Without thinking, because if she stops to think about it, she’ll never do it at all, Beau clears her throat awkwardly and starts to speak. “So, uh, once upon a time there was, um, a beautiful tiefling girl. _Woman_. And she lived in, like, a real fancy place in a nice city. And she was really fucking cool, and funny and nice, and she had lots of friends, and, uh, a dog...”

“Was she blue?”

Beau startles. “What?”

“The tiefling.” Jester takes a deep breath, leaning just slightly into Beau. “Was she blue?”

“Yeah,” Beau shifts, finding a comfortable position but making sure she’s holding Jester all the time. “Yeah, she was blue. It’s the best colour, right?”

Jester makes a sound that might be agreement, but also seems suspiciously like a strangled sob, so Beau continues the story. She knows she’s not as good at is as Jester is - her threads get tangled, and her descriptions are kind of half-assed, and she goes off on a couple of tangents that she thinks might have got kind of weird somewhere in there, but damn it, she tries.

She reaches an end, after a while, where the definitely-not-Jester beautiful blue tiefling has fought off a bad guy with magic, and saved all her friends from his dungeon, and gets to wear a frilly dress and go to a ball. She thinks if Jester had been telling the story, there might have been a handsome prince to sweep her off her feet, but Beau can’t quite bring herself to put that in.

There’s a little silence, after she finishes - just long enough for her to think the whole thing had been a mistake, like maybe she should apologise for her horrible storytelling skills or something - but then Jester lets out a long sigh, and relaxes fully into Beau’s arms, and the feel of her there takes over Beau’s whole brain for a moment.

“Thank you, Beau,” Jester says, her voice kind of muffled against Beau’s shoulder, and Beau realises Jester’s crying, just a bit. “That was a really good story.”

Beau wants to press a kiss to Jester’s forehead. Perhaps once she would have done, but it feels weirdly weighted now, and she can’t quite do it.

“I want Yasha to come back,” Jester says, after a minute. “I want us to save her.”

Beau swallows down a sudden lump in her throat, blinking hard against the sting in her eyes. “Yeah.” She tries to summon up something comforting to say but she’s drawing a blank. In the end, she says the only thing she can. “Yeah, I want that too.”

They sit like that for a while, until Jester wipes her eyes. “Maybe I can tell her stories too, when she comes back. Maybe that’ll help her.”

Beau pictures Jester telling stories to Yasha in front of the flower mural she painted in Yasha’s room. She thinks that Yasha would like that, if she comes back. When she comes back. When they save her.

And just for that moment, Beau believes they really might.

***

Of course, when Yasha does come back to them, it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s hard and it’s painful and it’s bloody, and it hardly feels like a win at all.

It takes a long time before any of them feel like they can even begin to let their guard down around her, and longer still before Yasha can look any of them in the eyes.

Everything about what happened to Yasha makes Beau so angry she wants to scream, or, like, burst apart at the seams, somehow. Caduceus tells her to focus on Yasha’s healing - on the ways they can help her get a little better. One day at a time.

Beau knows he’s talking sense, but she still wishes she could kick the shit out of something and fix it.

One night, Beau stops Jester’s story (an exciting one, all about rebellions and mistaken identities) in its tracks with a finger pressed to her lips. She steps noiselessly across the room, following the faint sound she heard, drops into a fighting stance, and throws the door open, fists at the ready.

In the hallway, almost right in the doorway, Yasha sits with her back against the wall, looking up at Beau. There are dark circles under her eyes, Beau notices, like she hasn’t slept properly in weeks.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was listening.”

“Uh, sure,” Beau replies, eloquently. “Sure. Do you, uh, want to come in?”

“I can leave, if you wanted to talk to Beau!” Jester pipes up from behind her, which Beau is pretty sure makes things even weirder than they were a second ago.

Yasha gets to her feet. “No. No, thank you. It was very good. Your story, I liked it a lot.” She shrugs. “I think I’ll go to bed now.” She turns and walks away, adding a quick, “goodnight,” over her shoulder, so quietly that Beau almost misses it.

“Shit,” Beau says, with feeling, once she’s back inside their room with the door shut behind her.

Jester, however, smiles, a slight flush to her cheeks. “We’re going to be ok, you know,” she says, fiddling with her symbol of the Traveler. “All of us.”

She carries on with the story, adding in a daring rescue by a moonlit lake. Beau listens as best she can, though she feels like half her thoughts follow Yasha, not to her own room next door where Beau knows she hasn’t stayed a full night since she got back, but up to the roof to sit in quiet contemplation, the light of Caduceus’s tree reflecting in her eyes.

***

Jester sits next to Beau, weaving a tale about a human woman who meets her tiefling true love on the high seas. They’re separated for a while, through tragic but unavoidable circumstances, but then, through cleverness and determination, they find each other again. Jester describes their reunion in enthusiastic detail - a kiss in front of a blazing sunset, of course, and then...

“Wellllll, and then they go inside the house, and Ellenore takes Rosemarie up to her bedroom and they do a _bunch_ of really fun things without their clothes on.” Jester never goes into more detail than that with the stories she makes up herself, though she’ll happily read to the whole group from a book full of luridly detailed smut. “The end.”

Beau grins. “That one was _awesome_.” 

“Yeah,” Jester says with an edge of smugness. “I know.” She slides down in the bed until she’s face to face with Beau, their noses practically touching. “It is one of my favourites, I think.”

Jester is close enough that Beau can feel every breath she takes. She can feel the shape of Jester, pressed against her, and she feels dizzy with it. “Yeah?” Beau says, and her voice comes out almost a whisper.

Jester doesn’t reply. She looks at Beau, her eyes very wide, and Beau feels like she could fall into them forever. Or at the very least, she could lie here forever, and just look at Jester, and listen to her stories, and perhaps she would be happy. Perhaps that would be enough.

Jester’s mouth is right there. Right fucking there. Her lips are slightly parted, and they look just as soft and perfect as the rest of her, and she smells so incredibly, impossibly good, and Beau leans forward that fraction of an inch needed, and kisses her.

Kissing Jester is beyond amazing, for exactly half a second, until Beau’s brain catches up with what she’s just done. She jerks her head away, and the rest of her follows, scurrying backwards off the bed so fast she almost falls flat on the floor, monk reflexes kicking in just in time that she catches herself and lands on her feet.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says, raising her hands in front of her, her words coming out too fast. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

She hardly takes in the shock on Jester’s face before she turns and runs.

Out the door, down one corridor, then another. She thinks about leaving the house altogether, nightwear be damned, but instead fetches up down by the hot tub, crouched in a corner with her back to the cool stone wall and her head buried in her knees. _Fuck_.

This was the one thing she told herself not to do. The one friendship she least wanted to fuck up, and now it’s all gone to the nine fucking hells and back. She doesn’t doubt that Jester will forgive her - that’s who Jester is. But it won’t be the same. Not after this. Not now that Jester _knows_.

She can’t go back to their room tonight. Maybe there’s a spare bed somewhere that none of them is using. Maybe Caleb will let her bunk on his floor. Maybe she’ll just stay down here, forever, and not have to face Jester or anyone in the morning.

She’s been down there maybe ten minutes when she hears someone else come into the room, and she knows it’s Jester before she looks up. Gods damn it. Of course Jester would follow her. She should have left. Gone and found some all-night dive bar on the outskirts of town and got fucked up enough not to care any more.

She raises her head, and she knows her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are probably bloodshot and she must look like even more of a shitshow than normal. “Hey, Jes…” It comes out a croak, so she tries again. “Jester. Look, I’m really sorry, I won’t do it again. I shouldn’t have…”

By this point Jester has made it across the room. She drops down next to Beau and puts her fingers to Beau’s lips, cutting her off mid-sentence. “Shut up, Beau.” Jester wriggles, straightening her nightdress between her and the cold floor.

“Once upon a time,” she continues, once she’s settled. “There was a blue tiefling girl, and she lived in the Lavish Chateau with her momma, and she was really happy there, especially because the coolest god ever was her best friend and helped her learn magic. And she read a lot of books, because she didn’t get to go many places, and all her books talked about big adventures, out in the world, and she wanted to have adventures, out in the world with her magic, just like in the books. And some of the stories were about romance, and she wanted that too, just like in her books.

“And one day when she was grown, she went out into the world, and she had a lot of adventures, and some of them were pretty scary and horrible, and some were really exciting, but they were all pretty different to the ones in her books. She met a lot of friends, also, and they were better than the people in her books too.

“But she hadn’t really thought about how, if the adventures and the friends were different in real life, then the romance might be different too.” Jester turns to Beau and looks right into her eyes. “It might be better.”

Beau can hear her own pulse pounding in her ears, and she couldn’t look away if she wanted to. She feels like Jester’s cast a spell on her, holding her right there in her gaze. And then Jester leans forward and kisses her.

This kiss lasts a while, long enough for Beau to realise that kissing Jester really is wonderful. Is better than she had ever imagined it might be. She cups the back of Jester’s head with one hand, tangling her fingers in her hair and kisses her again, deeper this time, and when they part, they’re both a bit breathless.

Jester grins, and her lips look a little swollen and like Beau just wants to keep kissing them forever. “You know, Beau,” she says with a speculative air, “I always thought you wanted to kiss Yasha, not me, but I guess you want to kiss me and Yasha both.”

Beau, taken off-guard and to her own complete and utter horror, feels her face immediately go hot, and knows she’s blushing a deep and unmistakable crimson. Well, if she hadn’t fucked this up before, she’s pretty sure she has now. It was nice while it lasted.

But Jester’s grin only widens. “I knew it!” She flutters a tiny kiss against the corner or Beau’s mouth, then whispers, “I do too, I think. I like you, and I like Yasha as well.”

A lot has happened to Beau tonight, and a lot seems to keep happening. She can’t even begin to formulate a thought on that one right now. Luckily, Jester saves her from having to by leaning back in and capturing her mouth for a kiss that steals every last worry right out of her head. Everything is Jester - Jester’s lips, her tongue, the nip of her teeth. Jester’s tail wrapping around Beau’s thigh, her fingertips creeping under the edge of Beau’s shirt and finding bare skin there, making her shiver.

Eventually they part long enough for Beau to gasp, “bed?” and Jester to nod. Beau would quite happily just stay here, but she wants Jester to be somewhere nicer. They stop at least three times along the way, in corridors and on staircases, pushed up against walls for searing kisses and wandering fingers, Beau’s hands drawing intricate patterns over Jester’s lower back, Jester’s nails digging deliciously into the taut muscles of Beau’s shoulders.

When they get there, the door shut behind them, they have space and time for any number of things that Beau would never before have dared to dream.

***

A few days later, Beau follows the sound of Jester’s voice to Yasha’s room, where she finds the two of them sitting in front of the flower mural on a pile of cushions that Jester has clearly dragged in from their own room. Jester is telling Yasha a story about, as far as Beau can tell from what she overheard, a strong, brave knight who adopts a tiny kitten.

Beau stops in the doorway and just watches them both. They sit facing each other, Yasha cross-legged, and Jester with her knees pulled up to her chest, both utterly engrossed. Beau watches Jester’s hands move, gesturing expansively, her fingers curling and stretching, illustrating her points. She watches the bright, open interest on Yasha’s face - a light in her eyes that she hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s beautiful. They’re both so beautiful it makes Beau’s heart ache.

She’s about to turn and leave them to it when Jester catches sight of her. “Come sit down, Beau! I’m just getting to the really good part.”

Beau looks to Yasha, and Yasha nods her agreement. Beau’s not always great at reading people, but she’s pretty sure Yasha looks genuinely pleased that she’s there. Something uncoils itself low in her belly, and her heart dances a little rhythm that feels like victory.

When the story ends, Jester gets up on her knees and leans across to kiss Yasha, gently but thoroughly. It’s clearly not their first kiss. Beau, sitting right there, next to them both, doesn’t think she remembers how to breathe.

Holding Yasha’s hand, Jester pulls away from their kiss and turns to Beau, kissing her in a way that’s just starting to become wonderfully familiar.

Jester sits back, and Beau and Yasha’s eyes meet. For a long moment, neither of them moves or speaks, the tension between them so dense and tightly strung that Beau’s surprised she can’t physically see it.

Beau thinks she leans in first, but Yasha follows almost immediately. Their noses bump and they have to readjust, but then. Then Beau kisses Yasha, or Yasha kisses Beau, and it’s… perfect, Beau is pretty fucking certain that it’s perfect. Kissing Yasha doesn’t feel like kissing Jester. It’s as different as kisses can be. But kissing Jester is perfect, and so is kissing Yasha, and Beau knows in that instant, with absolute crystal clarity, that she wants to keep kissing both of them, for as long as they both want her to.

She kisses each of them again, first Yasha, and then Jester, and feels something in the very centre of herself slotting into place.

There’s still a ways to go, but for the first time Beau kind of believes what Jester said to her when Yasha first came back. Maybe they’ll be ok. All of them.

***

That night, they lie comfortably across two beds pushed together, tucked close around each other in a tangle of limbs. Beau’s head pillowed on Yasha’s chest, and Jester’s arm flung over Beau’s middle, all three of their bodies heavy with tiredness and warmth and satisfaction. There in the cosy half-dark, together, Beau and Jester listen.

Yasha tells them a story.


End file.
